Friday Email: 17 February 2017

Every Friday morning our lead analyst Mark Riding sends out his
weekly run-down
and
upcoming events
in the investor calendar, like this one:

The market is continuing to drift along within its relatively narrow trading range with the FTSE 100 up about 50 points over the past month.

The past week brought little in the way of news. There was a big increase in the dividend from Acacia Mining as the sector continues to strengthen. Shire also produced a dollar fuelled near 35% increase in its final dividend to holders of the UK ordinary shares. In the coming week there are a couple of pretty fat dividends to be had. The first comes from beaten down Easyjet who are well out of favour with investors at the moment. They will pay 53.8p against a share price of 951p. At current levels the shares look pretty good value in spite of a further tough year ahead. The management remains strong and they have been performing well operationally. The other big payout this coming week comes from debt free Shoe Zone. They will pay 14.8p (6.8p ordinary and an 8p special) against a share price of 181p. They generate plenty of cash and like to keep a cash balance of £11 million (12% of market cap) for business purposes. All cash above this level is paid out as a special dividend at the end of each year. Stripping out the 22p per share for the cash pot, they trade on an ex-cash P/E of just over 9x.

The week ahead is the busiest week of the year to date with plenty of companies reporting in the first four days of the week; with only WPP reporting on Friday.

This email was originally sent on
Friday 17 February 2017

The Friday email is delivered to
over 20,000 subscriber’s
every week, and remains a widely read run-down of recent events and what investors can expect in the week ahead written by our chief analyst Mark Riding.

The market is trading in a fairly narrow range at the moment. The FTSE 100 has gained about 100 points this week and is within a hundred points of the all time high reached in mid January. Hopefully the phase of hearing what Donald Trump has done every day will pass soon. He does seem to be a little quieter this week; Although he did spark a rally on Wall Street last night by stating that he was going to do something phenomenal in the tax area.